All-In-One Sair Linux and GNU Certified Administrator Exam
Guide

The cover of this book proclaims "All-in-One is All You Need".
It surely is not. In fact, if you were to rely upon this as "both a
study guide and an on-the-job reference" (as the cover blurb
suggests), you'd probably flunk the certification exam and not last
long at your job.

The first thing that pops out is that this book is badly edited.
Early on there is a reference to the "Intel 80 by 86 family of
CPU's"- a sure sign of either automated editing or editing by a
completely non-technical person. I don't know which is worse;
frankly I'd rather no editing at all if those are the only
choices.

In general, this is a confused work. It jumps around from
subject to subject, with only the loosest thread of continuity.
Unexplained references to material not yet covered are too common.
But that's not the worst of it: there is a tremendous amount of
misleading or just plain wrong information. For example, Run level
"s" is explained as:

Run level s is a single user state that
enables the use of the system by only one user. This should be used
when you want all other users off the system or you have a
single-user personal system. (emphasis mine)

A section on POP and IMAP completely fails to explain the most
important difference (that IMAP allows the download of headers
only), the TCP/IP section does a particularly poor job of
explaining routing, and so on.

There's too much of that sort of thing. On the other hand, there
actually is good information to be had here, which makes it all the
more sad that so much of it is badly done. Some chapters are
actually very good, and there are a number of useful tips that I
haven't seen in other places. That makes me suspect that at least
one of the authors is the problem here.

The chapter exam questions are generally of poor quality, and
the answers are often as misleading or wrong as the text. The
enclosed CD is (of course) a Windows-only program that amazingly
requires two reboots to install. On my system, it crashed before it
actually completed the install, so I never did find out if the CD
was worth anything.